We report an amplification-free thin-disk laser oscillatory system delivering 0.9 GW peak power. The 120 fs pulses at 14 MHz containing 12.8 $μ$J delivered by thin-disk oscillator were compressed by factor 15 down to 8.0 fs with 148 W average output power and 82 % overall efficiency. Additionally, we showed that even a sub-two-cycle operation with 6.2 fs can be reached with this technology. The system will be a crucial part of the XUV frequency comb being developed and a unique high-repetition rate driver for attosecond pulse generation.
Mamyshev oscillator based on gain-managed nonlinearity and chirped pulse amplification
Research Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Dongguan University of Technology（东莞理工学院交叉科学研究院与材料科学与工程学院）；EMGO-TECH Ltd.（恩格科技有限公司）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）；School of Physics, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学物理学院）；Faculty of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics, Ningbo University（宁波大学机械工程与力学学院）
Phase-stabilized 12-fs, 1-nJ pulses from a commercial Ti:sapphire oscillator are directly amplified in a chirped-pulse optical parametric amplifier and recompressed to yield near-transform-limited 17.3-fs pulses. The amplification process is demonstrated to be phase preserving and leads to 85-uJ, carrier-envelope-offset phase-locked pulses at 1 kHz for 0.9 mJ of pump, corresponding to a single-pass gain of 8.5 x 10^4.
A compact and versatile femtosecond mid-IR source is presented, based on an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) synchronously pumped by a commercial 250-MHz Er:fiber laser. The mid-IR spectrum can be tuned in the range 2.25-2.6 μm (signal) and 4.1-4.9 μm (idler), with average power from 20 to 60 mW. At 2.5 μm a minimum pulse duration of 110 fs and a power of 40 mW have been obtained. Active stabilization of the OPO cavity length has been achieved in the whole tuning range.
Few-cycle THz Pulse Generation in DSTMS Crystal Pumped by a 8.3-MHz Amplified Mamyshev Oscillator
Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche（意大利国家研究委员会光子学与纳米技术研究所）；Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学物理系）；Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell’Informazione, Università di Pavia（帕维亚大学工业与信息工程系）；Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Roma ”La Sapienza”（罗马第一大学物理系）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Roma（意大利国家核物理研究所罗马分部）
Optical oscillators present a powerful optimization mechanism. The inherent competition for the gain resources between possible modes of oscillation entails the prevalence of the most efficient single mode. We harness this 'ultrafast' coherent feedback to optimize an optical field \emph{in time}, and show that when an optical oscillator based on a molecular gain medium is synchronously-pumped by ultrashort pulses, a temporally coherent multi mode field can develop that optimally dumps a general, dynamically-evolving vibrational wave-packet, into a \emph{single vibrational target state}. Measur…
Here, we demonstrate all-fiber direct amplification of 11 picosecond pulses from a gain-switched laser diode at 1063nm. The diode was driven at a repetition rate of 40MHz and delivered 13$μ$W of fiber-coupled average output power. For the low output pulse energy of 0.33pJ we have designed a multi-stage core pumped preamplifier based on single clad Yb-doped fibers in order to keep the contribution of undesired amplified spontaneous emission as low as possible and to minimize temporal and spectral broadening. After the preamplifier we reduced the 40MHz repetition rate to 1MHz using a fiber coupl…
Cavity optoelectromechanical regenerative amplification is demonstrated. An optical cavity enhances mechanical transduction, allowing sensitive measurement even for heavy oscillators. A 27.3 MHz mechanical mode of a microtoroid was linewidth narrowed to 6.6\pm1.4 mHz, 30 times smaller than previously achieved with radiation pressure driving in such a system. These results may have applications in areas such as ultrasensitive optomechanical mass spectroscopy.
We report generation and measurement of a squeezed vacuum from a semi-monolithic Fabry-Perot optical parametric oscillator (OPO) up to 100 MHz at 1550 nm. The output coupler of the OPO is a flat surface of a nonlinear crystal with partially reflecting coating, which enables direct coupling with waveguide modules. Using the OPO, we observed 6.2dB of squeezing at 2 MHz and 3.0 dB of squeezing at 100 MHz. The OPO operates at the optimal wavelength to minimize propagation losses in silica waveguides and looks towards solving a bottleneck of downsizing these experiments: that of coupling between a …
We demonstrated all-fiber amplification of 11 ps pulses from a gain-switched laser diode at 1064 nm. The diode was driven at a repetition rate of 40 MHz and delivered 13 $μ$W of fiber-coupled average output power. For the low output pulse energy of 325 fJ we have designed a multi-stage core pumped pre-amplifier in order to keep the contribution of undesired amplified spontaneous emission as low as possible. By using a novel time-domain approach for determining the power spectral density ratio (PSD) of signal to noise, we identified the optimal working point for our pre-amplifier. After the pre…
We report the first demonstration to our knowledge of a continuously tunable picosecond laser operating around 1 MHz. The emission can be tuned from 640 to 685 nm and the repetition rate from 200 kHz to 1 MHz with a pulse duration of less than 200 ps. The system is based on a Nd:YVO4 passively Q-switched microchip laser providing a few tens of nJ per pulse. Two cascaded stages of amplification are then used to increase the pulse energy to several microJ . The frequency doubled radiation is then used to pump a periodically-poled-niobate-lithium (PPLN)-based optical parametric generator in an al…
We demonstrate the operation of an ultra low repetition rate, high peak power, picosecond diode pumped Nd:YVO4 passively mode locked laser oscillator. Repetition rates even below 1 MHz were achieved with the use of a new design multiple-pass cavity and a semiconductor saturable absorber. Long term stable operation at 1.2 MHz, pulse duration of 16.3 ps and average output power of 470 mW corresponding to 24 KW peak power pulses is reported. This is, to our knowledge, the lowest repetition rate high peak power pulses ever generated directly from a picosecond laser resonator without cavity dumping…
Experimental exploration of synchronization in scalable oscillator micro systems has unfolded a deeper understanding of networks, collective phenomena, and signal processing. Cavity optomechanical devices have played an important role in this scenario, with the perspective of bridging optical and radio frequencies through nonlinear classical and quantum synchronization concepts. In its simplest form, synchronization occurs when an oscillator is entrained by a signal with frequency nearby the oscillator's tone, and becomes increasingly challenging as their frequency detuning increases. Here, we…
A compact Kerr-lens mode-locked thin-disk oscillator delivering 110 MW output peak power, the highest among all oscillators, is reported. A pulse train with a repetition rate of 14 MHz carries 115 fs long, 14.4 uJ pulses resulting in 202 W of average power. This compact, simple, and stable oscillator is a suitable driver and an important milestone for further high harmonics generation and the development of extreme ultraviolet transportable frequency comb sources.
An ultrafast laser based on coherent beam combination of four ytterbium-doped step-index fiber amplifiers is presented. The system delivers an average power of 3.5 kW and a pulse duration of 430 fs at 80 MHz repetition rate. The beam quality is excellent (M2<1.24x1.10) and the relative intensity noise is as low as 1% in the frequency span from 1 Hz to 1 MHz. The system is turn-key operable as it features an automated spatial and temporal alignment of the interferometric amplification channels.
A novel technique for divided-pulse amplification is presented in a proof-of-principle experiment. A pulse burst, cut out of the pulse train of a mode-locked oscillator, is amplified and temporally combined into a single pulse. High combination efficiency and excellent pulse contrast are demonstrated. The system is mostly fiber-coupled, enabling a high interferometric stability. This approach provides access to the amplitude and phase of the individual pulses in the burst to be amplified, potentially allowing the compensation of gain saturation and nonlinear phase mismatches within the burst. …
Cooling of a 58 MHz micro-mechanical resonator from room temperature to 11 K is demonstrated using cavity enhanced radiation pressure. Detuned pumping of an optical resonance allows enhancement of the blue shifted motional sideband (caused by the oscillator's Brownian motion) with respect to the red-shifted sideband leading to cooling of the mechanical oscillator mode. The reported cooling mechanism is a manifestation of the effect of radiation pressure induced dynamical backaction. These results constitute an important step towards achieving ground state cooling of a mechanical oscillator.
We present a carrier-envelope offset (CEO) stable ytterbium-doped fiber chirped-pulse amplification system employing the technology of coherent beam combining and delivering more than 1 kW of average power at a pulse repetition rate of 80 MHz. The CEO stability of the system is 220 mrad rms, characterized out-of-loop with an f-to-2f interferometer in a frequency offset range of 10 Hz to 20 MHz. The high-power amplification system boosts the average power of the CEO stable oscillator by five orders of magnitude while increasing the phase noise by only 100 mrad. No evidence of CEO noise deterior…
We describe a tunable broadband mid-infrared laser source based on difference-frequency mixing of a 100 MHz femtosecond Yb:fiber laser oscillator and a Raman-shifted soliton generated with the same laser. The resulting light is tunable over 3.0 um to 4.4 um, with a FWHM bandwidth of 170 nm and maximum average output power up to 125 mW. The noise and coherence properties of this source are also investigated and described.
We demonstrate THz generation using the tilted pulse front method in Lithium Niobate, driven at unprecedented high average power of more than 100 W and at 13.3 MHz repetition rate, provided by a compact amplifier-free modelocked thin-disk oscillator. The conversion efficiency was optimized with respect to pump spot size and pump pulse duration, enabling us to generate a maximum THz average power of 66 mW, which is the highest reported to date from a laser-driven, few-cycle THz source. Furthermore, we identify beam walk-off as the main obstacle that currently limits the conversion efficiency in…
We present a tunable, hybrid waveguide-fiber optical parametric oscillator (OPO) synchronously pumped by an ultra-fast fiber laser exploiting four-wave mixing (FWM) generated in silicon nitride waveguides. Parametric oscillation results in a 35 dB enhancement of the idler spectral power density in comparison to spontaneous FWM, with the ability of wide wavelength tuning over 86 nm in the O-band. Measurements of the oscillation threshold and the efficiency of the feedback loop reveal how an integration of the OPO on a single silicon nitride chip can be accomplished at standard repetition rates …
We report on a new design for a femtosecond Ti:sapphire oscillator in which dispersion compensation is realized exclusively using mirrors, including special mirrors with third order dispersion. This makes the oscillator dynamically tunable over a spectral range of 45 nm using an intracavity wedge-pair; and it delivers 40 fs pulses at 80 MHz repetition rate. Due to the all-mirror design, the oscillator represents an attractive base for a tunable frequency comb for high precision spectroscopy applications.
We present a simple autocorrelator for ultraviolet pulses based on two-photon conductivity in a bench-top fabricatable sapphire sensor. We perform measurements on femtosecond 226 - 278 nm ultraviolet pulses from the third and fourth harmonics of a standard 76 MHz titanium sapphire oscillator and picosecond 266 nm pulses from the fourth harmonic of a 1064 nm 50 MHz neodymium vanadate oscillator. Our device is sensitive to 2.6 pJ ultraviolet pulses with peak powers below 20 W. These results represent the lowest measured autocorrelation peak powers by over one order of magnitude for a system with…
We study statistics of work done by two classical electric field pumps (two-photon and one-photon resonant pumps) on a quantum optical oscillator. We compute moment generating function for the energy change of the oscillator, interpreted as work done by the classical drives on the quantum oscillator starting out in a thermalized Boltzmann state. The moment generating function is inverted, analytically when only one of the pumps is turned on and numerically when both the pumps are turned on, to get the probability function for the work. The resulting probability function for the work done by th…
We synchronize a 8.06-GHz microwave signal from a voltage-controlled oscillator with an optical pulse train from a 77.5- MHz mode-locked Er-fiber laser using a fiber-based optical-microwave phase detector. The residual phase noise between the optical pulse train and the synchronized microwave signal is -133 dBc/Hz (-154 dBc/Hz) at 1 Hz (5 kHz) offset frequency, which results in 838 as integrated rms timing jitter [1 Hz - 1 MHz]. The long-term residual phase drift is 847 as (rms) measured over 2 hours, which reaches 4\times10^{-19} fractional frequency instability at 1800 s averaging time. This…
Engineered non-Hermitian systems featuring exceptional points can lead to a host of extraordinary phenomena in diverse fields ranging from photonics, acoustics, opto-mechanics, electronics, to atomic physics. Here we introduce and present non-Hermitian dynamics of coupled optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) arising from phase-sensitive amplification and de-amplification, and show their distinct advantages over conventional non-Hermitian systems relying on laser gain and loss. OPO-based non-Hermitian systems can benefit from the instantaneous nature of the parametric gain, noiseless phase-sen…
Highly coherent optical sources are a key element in several fields of physics, in particular in time frequency metrology. Over the past decennia, there has been particular efforts in developing such sources to the expense of sophisticated laser systems and relatively smart electronics. We propose here a new general principle of a self-adaptive oscillator where the intricate operation of a 100-m-long active optical resonator and a standard semiconductor laser offers a very high spectral purity and can be tailored to any wavelength. Single frequency operation of this self-adaptive photonic osci…
In this work, we investigate an approach to scale up the output pulse energy in an all polarization-maintaining 17 MHz Yb-doped fiber oscillator via implementation of 25 um core-diameter large-mode-area fibers. The artificial saturable absorber in form of a Kerr-type self-stabilized fiber-interferometer enables highly stable mode-locked steady-states in the soliton-like operation regime with 170 mW average output power and a total output pulse energy of ~10 nJ distributed between two output ports. An experimental parameter comparison with a reference oscillator made of 5.5 um core-sized standa…
We demonstrate a method that enables accurate timing jitter spectral density characterization of free-running mode-locked laser oscillators over more than 10-decade of Fourier frequency from mHz to tens MHz range. The method is based on analyzing both the input voltage noise to the slave laser and the output voltage noise from the balanced optical cross- correlator (BOC), when two mode-locked lasers are synchronized in repetition rate by the BOC. As a demonstration experiment, timing jitter spectrum of a free-running mode-locked Er-fiber laser with a dynamic range of >340 dB is measured over F…
State-of-the-art optical oscillators based on lasers frequency stabilized to high finesse optical cavities are limited by thermal noise that causes fluctuations of the cavity length. Thermal noise represents a fundamental limit to the stability of an optical interferometer and plays a key role in modern optical metrology. We demonstrate a novel design to reduce the thermal noise limit for optical cavities by an order of magnitude and present an experimental realization of this new cavity system, demonstrating the most stable oscillator of any kind to date. The cavity spacer and the mirror subs…
We report on a low-noise diode laser oscillator at 972 nm actively stabilized to an ultra-stable vibrationally- and thermally compensated reference cavity. To increase the fraction of laser power in the carrier we designed a 20 cm long external cavity diode laser with an intra-cavity electro-optical modulator. The fractional power in the carrier reaches 99.9% which corresponds to a rms phase noise of $ϕ^2_\textrm{rms}=1\,\textrm{mrad}^2$ in 10\,MHz bandwidth. Using this oscillator we recorded 1S-2S spectra in atomic hydrogen and have not observed any significant loss of the excitation efficien…
